Re: Guix System video review on YouTube

[zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com>]

Hi Jonathan,

Thank you for translating the feedback.
Because watching without understand German feels like "Guix is so cool!" ;-)


On Mon, 27 Apr 2020 at 00:34, Jonathan Brielmaier
<jonathan.brielmaier@web.de> wrote:

> * There is no /etc/os-release file. I think it was proposed a while ago,
> but the patch was rejected.

Naive question: what is useful for?
And what does it mean on rolling-release distro?


> * While installing packages via `guix install` you can't scroll in the
> terminal, you always get reset to the bottom.

I missed what it mean. Could you quickly extend a bit?


> * guix show/search does not show if a package is installed.

Installed where? In which profile?
I am not sure that "installed" make sense at the level of "guix show/search".

From my point of view, it could be interesting to know if the package
is already available in the store. Basically, if "guix build
--dry-run" completes all the recursive phases without download or
build. For a couple of packages (guix show), it is doable but it is
too much expensive for "guix search".

WDYT?


> * `guix search ... | less can be confusing at the beginning.

There is room of improvements for "guix search". ;-)

There is 3 behaviours
 1. return the N packages fitting the screen size (current: default)
 2. display all the list in PAGER (current: |less)
 3. display all the list in stdout (current: |cat)

The feature request is: be able to configure which behaviour by
default for "guix search". Maybe via an environment variable.
(as discussed elsewhere by Ricardo and Tobias, if I understand correctly)


WDYT?


What user expect by default is complicated and depends on the users
themself. :-)
For example, I always pipe with 'recsel' because coming from Debian
and used to 'aptitude', I only want the name of the package and then
show more if I need; i.e.,

   guix search crypto library | recel -C -P name
   # optional: time to time I pipe the result with 'grep'
   guix show libb2

Well, I find more confusing that "guix search" displays
name,synopsis,description,etc. than to pipe. So, taste and colour...
;-)


> * Multi user package concept not clear (root as different packages then
> normal user).

This is related to expectation about "installed", IMHO.


Thank you for the feedback. Really interesting!

Cheers,
simon